Posts by dbastianello

Re: Other Good Consequences

So you mean like what AMD has been doing since they introduced the AM# socket?

I've been arguing this point for almost two decades now, at least it is green compared to throwing away 80% of the hardware in a system every time one wants an upgrade.

You don't need to have spintronics for this, you can have it now... although being that AMD promised AM4 socket life up till 2020 (4 years commitment) I would say it is better to wait for the new socket to get best advantage of this model of computing. Plus you can say that you are an environmental tech as well, easy twofor.

Here's food for thought

Has anyone thought this might be less about Microsoft being friendly and more about loosing relevance in the IT world. Some previously low tech countries have matured quite quickly and now provide a real threat to having much much bigger competitors. And these said countries have had little to no respect for IP so even though MS might have been around longer they will get gobbled up by a bigger fish in the not too distant future. By putting all these patents up as open all of the sudden stops the value of stealing IP since anyone can do it and doesn't let the IP cash cow roll in cause you ain't gonna sue anyone for infringement since it is GPL.

Think about it this way, have you ever seen a movie where the "good" guy is trying to escape a pursuit from the "bad" guys and runs over to the fire alarm and pulls it... it all of the sudden causes confusion and everyone gets up so there is less chance of standing out.... It the patent world when you open source it then it all of the sudden allows many competitors to come out and play which causes "big fish" to preoccupied them self by the many fish that lay in front of it.... and will take out the "easy catch" or the "low hanging fruit" first.

This is a long term survival strategy.... and heck if they could just sell a Windows compatible UI that sits on Linux that would be the best thing for everyone I believe... heck I would even pay for it.... as long as their "let's do it for you" crap they have been implementing over the years can be turned off if wanted, you know so you can manually check things out and fix them (if you want, don't have to but if you can you will)

Now if you are in the security world it is not unreasonable to suspect that code commits to open source projects could be intentionally designed to allow certain hacking techniques to be successful. Now Linus is arguably one of the best coders out there (especially where code meets the hardware) and I am thankful that he is guarding this code.

Look to a government paying someone's tuition is pennies if he agrees to integrate this "code" to his commit for this debt to disappear. To this poor programmer with flexible morals, they would easily do this for much less than tuition but hey, this is the world we live in, and welcome.

We live in much less certain times especially when it come to technology, there are things going on that most people have a hard time accepting is happening and the country you are living in is probably one of the worst perpetrator of this.

Like many have mentioned, this outburst does not happen without many warnings before hand. His approach is truly needed, he just needs to learn how to make it not personal that is all call what you see as shit, not the person who wrote it, unless they have a habit of doing so on a regular basis. At that point have-at-him, they've earned it and hopefully the shame keeps them from doing so in the future. But we often forget what sociopathy or psychopathy really mean, they don't feel shame or any guilt at all they will not understand why. They will continue and as some have mentioned they should be given a time out and ignored from future contributions until they understand they can't play games, this is real life with real consequences.

Been saying for years

It will take millions if not billions of lost profits, lives and hell why not economies before we "get it". I've been griping for years about many things and this is one of them, "data sovereignty". I never understood the "work at home" concept when it comes to certain roles like developers who work for proprietary devshops or any/every IT role that has security in its title and we all know this is the main reasons why many of these files were exposed in the first place. As a security engineer I have accepted that I will never have a job where I get to work from home and honestly once in my past it was suggested that I could do my security work from home and I flatly refused it because that would make accountable if a hack occurred and it was discovered that it came from my home system. I love technology but after 28 years of heavily using PC's I still don't trust them.

One of the other big reasons is simple, too many IT people really should not work in IT. They might have the smarts but that doesn't mean they have the proper mindset. As a security SME I have for many years and on many occasions been caught saying "Computer security is a mindset, not a skill". Tech skills can always be taught but security is more of a philosophy.

You will often have executives within any organization who want a percentage given to them on "how secure is it". This is flatly wrong but it does get the greasy sec guy off the hook until they either leave or get hacked. To add to this complete and total lack of understanding of what "proper security" means you have quite often in positions where decisions are made people who should be technical'ish but are not... at all. They often have "feelings" on what is right and what is not, honestly for a device that has taken millennia's scientific/mathematics knowledge to devise the most complex mass produced piece of technology ever you would kind of believe that those "in charge" would at least have a clue.... THERE ARE NO *FEELINGS* IN TECHNICAL MATTERS, ONLY PROOF!... it's call the scientific method because science is what got us here in the first place.

When you have exhausted all legitimate ways to show growth...

Let's face it this is just a metrics game to show investors that Microsoft has an "Edge" on competitors. By forcing things this way it will definitely increase the MS Edge usage statistics. And anyone who has ever had to deal with the less technically competent knows that these users don't even know when they are in Firefox, Chrome or IE/Edge. These people, lets face it are the masses and they will skew the metrics.

MS has to indefinitely show growth otherwise why would someone buy MS stocks in the first place, investors need a return. Like pretty much the majority of the tech industry they have run out of legitimate ways of improving efficiency and profit margins. Now that they have run out tangible ways to show growth they are now resorting to playing these sneaky stats tricks to fool investors into believing that after almost 3 years of no uptake that users all of the sudden are throwing away their fav browser for this super over the top better than the rest browser call Edge.

Now lets see if they allow...

I remember reading a few years ago how to fined an Italian restaurant for daring to use the word pasta... you know like everyone else on the planet even the french in France....

Let see if it is okay to say pasta instead of Pâtes... hey maybe they should have done what Starbucks did and call them self "Le Starbucks". So I guess Le cheese, Le beer, Le thank you is good enough to fool them why legitimize those evil non-French words... or should I say Quebecois, since if you know that culture you know they have a hate on for France french.

Re: Enough with the "in the hands of consultants" male cow excrament

Fair enough about the graphic designer but honestly it is to make a point... but I guess there are those who enjoy being devil's advocate instead of actually understanding the idea behind things. Thank you for your input though, I will more thoroughly think through my examples in future as to satiate this type of thinking and not "confuse" people with the actual reality of how and when consultants are called upon.

Enough with the "in the hands of consultants" male cow excrament

I've been in IT for 25 years and there are consultants on either side of the camp Open/Closed. Consultants can either be awesome or horrible. They can screw up open source or proprietary, I've seen it all over the years. So enough with this BS, Open source is the way forward for the future of humanity... imagine if we had copyrights/patents at the beginning of humanity, we'd still be fighting over who invented the stick, fire, the wheel... and still be living in caves.

Open source is not so much about the code but more about the work (paid work) that can come of it. All companies seem to have no problems hiring (permanently or contract) graphic artists to create custom logos and designs but these same companies seem to have a hard time to wrap their heads around the concept of custom code. Ultimately competing companies operate roughly 80% the same which is why many of the open source code out there will do just fine. In that 80 % you have office work (documents, spread sheets, presentations, diagrams), research (web, pdf, calculations), entertainment (music, videos, gaming) ... all of these problems have been solved in open source and have been refined for many years now... we don't need the capital that proprietary companies required to get these ideas off the ground at the beginning. I still do see a place for closed source but that is in a very niche environment and not for the masses.

The benefit of open source is in that 20% difference between competing companies, this is where open source will shine. Of course companies like Microsoft will come in and say we have a 2000.00 (CND) dollar a day "engineer" who will come in and help, but then Microsoft owns those changes even though they are for your company... governments (especially the technically idiotic Canadian government) are especially affected by this, tax payers pay government to make custom apps/systems which are then implemented and since they are hacking closed source they get problems (cause they don't know what's under the hood) which require a consultant from the proprietary vendor to come in and fix it. They report back to HQ of these changes and they will integrate the "feature" into the next release and sell it for profit to others... what a pile of BS that is.... as a tax payer I demand a discount from these proprietary vendors for taking tax payers money and profiting from it.

At any rate stop trying to protect your job by saying open source is no panacea, you should be happy (especially if your a developer) since this will create more opportunity since no one owns open source and if one "consultancy" firm treats you like crap or pays you garbage you can just move onto the next until you find your cozy place. Stop thinking as far as tomorrow, think about a year or more from now.

Having been to Venice soon after McDonald's was allowed in...

Venice a beautiful city with history and architecture as far as the eye can see had changed from the times before I had been after McDonald's came in. It isn't just the golden arches that the people are trying to stop it is the mass amounts of bright yellow and red wrapping paper that is used to pack burgers and fry containers that overflow garbage bins everywhere you can see for as far as you can see that they are also trying to stop. When you use as much packing material as McDonald's does it fills bins really quick, check out this image:

http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2010-05-21-IMG_8379.JPG

This is a perfect example of what I am talking about, that is not the reason people go to Italy for, and come on have you ever eaten in Italy, why in hell would you choose double processed everything over the most amazing pizza in the world, never mind everything else that I would give my left nut for just for a taste. Hell I hate polenta (warm corn bread) but in Italy I couldn't get enough.